Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday June 17, 2010 @11:27AM
from the emergent-gameplay dept.

Calopteryx writes "New Scientist has a story on a self-replicating entity which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life. 'Dubbed Gemini, [Andrew Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape's length but, made up of two constructor arms and one "destructor," play a key role. Gemini's initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete. As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges, until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.'"

That's a superb joke, but if you're bored and want to read some extensions of the idea you should find a copy of Venus Equilateral [wikipedia.org] by George Smith some time. In one of the stories, engineers make (by mistake, basically) a device that can replicate other devices, and then realize it can replicate itself, so they build a few mostly for fun. Since they're on an isolated space station they transmit information about what they've done back to earth and then find out that earth's economy is collapsing because everyone's either duplicating money or duplicating duplication machines and there's no reason to buy anything. Smith explores how that affects the economy for a while (one character's snooty wife has to stop being a socialite and get a job as a nurse, because Smith was basically a 1930's misogynist) and then has his engineers cook up a physical item that contains energy, which the matter duplicator can't duplicate (since it only deals with matter) to act as a new basis for currency. He wrote all this in the 1940's, so, y'know, prior art and all that.

Is the "economy collapsing" a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing because everyone has all they want for free? Or a bad thing because now that there's no incentive to pay for products (information, entertainment, ideas) that there's no incentive to create new products (information, entertainment, ideas)?

A good thing, I say. Poverty will be eradicated, Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and everyone will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want. People will want to create new stuff, even lacking any normal incentive, simply out of boredom.

Let's just think through the repercussions of replicator technology a bit. Just because material goods are free does not mean services will be free. To get medical treatment, you would need money. To get money, you would need to do something that would enable you to get money, such as provide some kind of service to others. I don't think that just because our basic material needs would be met that we would have 16 hours a day to do what we want. Our jobs would simply change from producing goods to providing

No, you need something the doctor values. there is a big difference there. A doctor can replicate in car, boat, tv,, gold clubs whatever. Just like everyone else. So money, even the idea of money, looses its value.

OTOH, he may want services., or just do it because they like to help people.

Logically, this technology would mean that all physical items the doctor needs to treat people would be free. so his cost go down a lot.

no, it will change because the definition of wealth will change.Original work, labor, land. These will be the measure of wealth.

"Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and "

No, it will change to be used for people to by and sell shares of things that can't be duplicated.Original art*, manual labor and so on. When you want landscape done, what do you use to motivate people to do the work for you? A sky scraper? Barter? Land?

Poverty is not about being wealthy. As Wikipedia puts it, "poverty means being unable to afford basic human needs". If the basic human needs are provided for everyone, regardless of the social structure that emerges afterward there will by definition be no poverty.

Why do you assume they won't be beholden to a landlord?

Because land outside of cities is very cheap, and will get even cheaper if the demand to use it for food production disappears. Since the main point of living in cities is not having to drive 3 hours to work, and work will no longer be a part of m

A good thing, I say. Poverty will be eradicated, Wall Street will disappear into uselessness and everyone will have 16 hours a day of time to do whatever they want. People will want to create new stuff, even lacking any normal incentive, simply out of boredom.

Unfortunately, history disagrees. The Samoan islands were a utopia; food was freely available by wading out into the bay and shelter was almost unnecessary due to the clement weather. So, everyone's favorite pastime was fucking and drowning the excess babies. Compare this to the Mediterranean, where earlier ecological collapse had ruined the farmlands and you needed walls to keep out hostile neighbors. The upper class'es favorite pastime? Natural philosophy.

Given that, in this case, "economy collapsing" seems to be a synonym for "post-scarcity economy breaking out", I'd have to go with "good".

Even if Home Taping Is Killing Music(tm), there would be about a billion people being too busy having enough to eat for the first time in their lives to give a fuck. (Plus, of course, the "think of the poor artists" argument kind of breaks down when the artists are all sprawled out around their post-scarcity-cocaine-replicator, having a grand old time...)

I dunno, while The Diamond Age and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom were interesting places to visit, I (and most of the characters) wouldn't want to live there. Of course both of those societies had haves and have-nots based on resources that continued to be scarce (raw matter/energy in one and human regard in the other).

To be fair, The Diamond Age was not truly a post-scarcity society because people had to pay for the energy used for duplication (hence the scene where after the kids had created all this stuff they had to stick it all back in the compiler and destroy it again because their mom couldn't pay the bill for what they'd made.) So, what they had was an everything-available-for-a-reasonable-price society, a la iTunes. Unfortunately for our future, I think that's the most likely result if/when we DO manage to make

Is the "economy collapsing" a good thing or a bad thing? A good thing because everyone has all they want for free? Or a bad thing because now that there's no incentive to pay for products (information, entertainment, ideas) that there's no incentive to create new products (information, entertainment, ideas)?

If not being paid removes the incentive to create new products, then how do you explain Linux, or any other Free Software?

Not getting paid to do it means that products, entertainment, information, ideas

Reading in between the lines of the article, it sounds like this thing manages to create the copy before the destruction of the original is complete, unlike a glider which is basically moving itself. But it seems a fairly arbitrary distinction, since that destruction is going to happen and it's not going to reverse itself.

Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.

Perhaps the trick is that this thing can _teleport_ itself a few cells away, without passing through the intervening space, but again, that seems kind of an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.

Agreed. Kind of like all of the commonly accepted scientific definition of "life" [wikipedia.org]. Requirements that lifeforms be made of cells or have a metabolism seem incredibly silly in face of the possibilities computation has presented us. The entire topic is wishy-washy and not terribly objective. People just make up th

You're being disingenuous. By saying "Conway is the guy who invented it" in the same sentence as promoting a website that has conway in the domain name, I find it difficult to conclude that there wasn't meant to be an implied association between the two. This is especially true given that everyone already knows it's "Conway's Game of Life" (that's in the article title) and given that when you parse the sentence, "it" refers to the forum.

If I understand correctly, it creates two copies while self-destructing in the process. So it is, indeed, replicating.

Now that's interesting.

When i first read the headline I was befuddled. The whole point of the game is that its structures replicate themselves and create other things all over the map.

But I don't recall ever seeing one that made multiple copies of itself, and then died.

This is a tricky point. The people who say that this new pattern is not ultimately different from a glider are correct, in a sense -- the Gemini spaceship is technically a spaceship, not a replicator.

It _does_ make two copies -- but the copies are of the two replicator units at the ends of the glider channels, not of the entire spaceship.

But replicator units replicating themselves, even with the help of an outside stream of instructions (which is then reflected on to the next newly-created copy of a replicator unit) are still something that hasn't been seen before in the Life universe. So this is a much more impressive technical accomplishment than, say, finding a new variety of spaceship using a search utility.

Gliders and spaceships "replicate" themselves in somewhat the same way that salt crystals or wildfires do -- that's just the way the universe works, you might say. But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.

The replicator units are like robots that include all the tools needed to make more robots exactly like themselves -- but they're radio-controlled and have no internal memory, so you have to pipe the actual construction recipe in from somewhere else. That means they're not self-contained self-replicators, true -- but they're a darn sight closer than a salt crystal or a glider!

Eventually someone will build a pattern with an internal memory that can hold a complete self-construction recipe -- but the Gemini is an important milestone along the way to that goal, and the first true Life replicator will probably contain ideas taken from the Gemini, just as the Gemini contains ideas and mechanisms from preceding patterns.

But the Gemini pattern keeps itself going by continuously reconstructing itself, in *spite* of the way the universe normally works.

how so?

I was hoping someone would ask that. Let me start out with a comparison to other cellular automata. Conway's Life is B3/S23 -- "born if 3 neighbors, survives if 2 or 3 neighbors". There are other rules, such as HighLife [wikipedia.org] (B36/S23, very close to Conway's Life) in which a 12-cell pattern can replicate itself -- after 12 generations there are 2 copies, after 36 ticks there are 4 copies, and so on. This pattern regularly evolves from random starting states.

The article is a bit mystifying, but it does refer several times to the original "gemini" being destroyed while a single new one is created. It also seems to require the "tape" of glider "bits" coming into it to create the copy, which makes it even less "replicating" than a basic glider.

It's more like kicking a very big pattern across the screen than it is "self-replication". Gemini moves from one location to another far away, and it required a swift kick to get it there. In this case the kicking is prob

Yes, you're right. TFA is rather confusing on the precise nature of the thing, but the Gemini article [conwaylife.com] on LifeWiki explains what it actually is:

... Alternatively, 'knightship' may refer to any spaceship that travels in an oblique direction (not diagonally or orthogonally). The first oblique spaceship to be discovered, Gemini, was found in May, 2010 with a velocity of (5120,1024)c/33699586. In June, 2010 Dave Greene constructed the first true knightship in Life, which is based on Gemini and travels at a velocity of (4096,8192)/c35567490.

No, but it's mobile and runs completely on electricity, so it's an EV vehicle. It's got a CVT transmission and qualifies as a PZEV vehicle as well. I haven't seen the diagrams, but I assume it would run on DC current.

When it runs out of power, your SOL of luck, though. But only an astute/.dot reader would know about that if they RTFAed the article.

That's an awesome pattern for sure. But to be a self-replicating pattern, the glider-gun breeder would need to breed glider-gun breeders. (did I get that right?)

I still can't tell from the comments if the pattern in the article is *actually* self-replicating, or if it just destroys itself while creating a single copy. If that's all it does, this doesn't sound any more remarkable than your basic glider, which also "replicates and destroys itself" as it moves across the screen.

I wasn't offering the breeder pattern as an example of self-replication, just as an example of a "glider gun gun". As for Wade's pattern... Well, I've been running the simulation for over an hour and it's barely past generation 10M (and the actual replication isn't supposed to be complete until almost 40M). Perhaps the construction outpaces the destruction in such a way that we do have two full copies of the original pattern, eventually.

Wolfram did seem impressed by Wade's pattern; he just said that the int

The impressive part seems to me to be that this pattern in Conway's Game of Life makes a copy of itself within the rules of the game. A robot designed to build a copy of itself does so within the much more flexible rules of real-world physics.

Then again, maybe the impressive thing is that there are people out there with enough time on their hands to run 34 million iterations of the Game of Life with enough different patterns to find this one.

In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.

Really? Not the universal Turing machine pattern, or the pattern that emulates the game of life itself? Those both seem more impressive to me.

Well, he did say "arguably", which is arguably the worst weasel word in the history of mankind.

FUNNY! But at the same time, I think weasel words are critically important. Science should be based on weasel words: may, could, indicates, possibly, probably, likely. When you hear someone saying non-weasel words: is, will, shall, always -- you're either talking to God or to someone who talks to God. Mathematicians, for instance, which is why they can say that in base 10, two plus two IS four. But past that, I'm all for weasel words.

Those are patterns in the game of life itself. The Turing Machine one is particularly impressive. It demonstrates that the game itself is a Turing-complete computation engine - the more complex version is a Universal Turing Machine, so you can encode any arbitrary algorithm on the 'tape' (a streak of cells that runs diagonally across the grid).

Given that it demonstrated the Turing completeness of the system, it's probably the most important pattern, as it shows that you can create a pattern with any algorithmic behaviour that you want. This includes providing a proof that the pattern discussed in TFA is possible, although not (of course) telling you how to create it. This pattern is interesting, but knowing that it's possible is more interesting than knowing exactly what it is.

I didn't realise that a universal Turing machine had been implemented in Life. That is utterly cool, and in this context, the self-replicating pattern becomes a demonstration of the proof you point out.

I'd still say that the self-constructing pattern is in the top five, but maybe not #1 anymore.

This is slashdot -- some people here think that's actually how it works, while many more think births are all faked by the government, and still more are arguing for more openness in the early stages of the process.

Yes. Humans wouldn't be terribly interesting creatures if that's all they could do, would they? All we'd have in the world is 1 human, "Eve", who keeps dying after birthing a new Eve.

Now a human giving birth to *multiple* humans and then dying off? THAT is what makes life "life". I'm pretty sure this is the expected definition of self replication - an entity creating multiple copies of itself before dying. This gives us robust exponential growth. In the Eve scenario, as soon as any one Eve dies before

The Game of Life is one of the first cellular automata discovered that had simple rules but complicated behavior. The rules very roughly mimic bacterial growth. One has an infinite lattice grid, and some starting set of cells on the grid are designated as alive (every cell on the grid is either alive or dead). Each new generation is made by the following four rules: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies. Any living cell with more than three live neighbors dies. Any living cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. Any dead cell with three live neighbors (exactly) becomes a live cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life [wikipedia.org]

The Game of Life is mathematically interesting because it can be shown to be Turing complete. That is, if you have a process that tells you whether any given starting configuration will eventually dieout then you can answer whether any given computer program will eventually halt. In general, there's a theorem known as the Turing Halting Theorem which says that no general procedure exists to do that for all programs.

Prior to the work in TFA, there were known configurations called "gliders" which could replicate themselves as they moved across the grid, but they only left the same number of copies. There were also configurations which could spawn gliders (called glider guns). However, no configuration that was actually self-replicating in the sense of spawning more copies of itself was known. This work by Andrew Wade shows how to make configurations that do self-replicate. His original announcement is at http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0 [conwaylife.com] and the actual configuration can be found at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9e96aFfebqqZmY5NjBkYjctY2ViNi00NmJlLTgwZDAtNmU5OTQwYjc1OWQ0&hl=en&pli=1 [google.com] Thus, this very simply system is still showing itself to have surprising and interesting behavior 30 years after the fact.

Turing-complete means that it is able to perform all of the functions of a universal Turing machine, not that it is able to solve the Turing halting problem; a Turing-complete language (or system) by definition is unable to solve the halting problem expressed within that system.

The Google Docs page with the Gemini.zip file is not allowing any more downloads right now.
Here [conwaylife.com] is another link with more info about Gemini and an alternate download hosted on drop.io. Follow the instructions on page 2 of the original article to set it up.

I remember reading about this 20 years ago in (IIRC) Omni.. it was an introduction to circuitry (it used the rules as an example to demonstrate logic gates.) I didn't know it had a name, and while I always thought it would be a cool thing to code (now that I can) I'd never thought someone had actually done it... thanks for the links!:)

That sentence sounds like bullshit inserted to make the story appealing to people who aren't interested in the maths. Like the virus reference in the start. "Ooh, self-replicating; it's like DNA." It's the same thing that makes quantum physicists groan when the word "teleportation" is mentioned.

This is a fascinating pattern, but there is nothing magical, otherworldly or philosophical about it.

Detrimental traits such as lactose-intolerance can be preserved if there is no or weak evolutionary pressure for this trait. But over time and changing enviroments it's the beneficial traits that are more likely to preserve the genotype.
A better wording is perhaps that the enviromental viability of a geno and phenotype is what is the driving force behind evolution.